Amanda Taub in the New York Times:
Adam Przeworski, a political scientist, left his native Poland a few months before the 1968 Prague Spring uprising and found he could not return home. To avoid being arrested as a dissident by the Communist government, he accepted a job abroad at a university in Santiago, Chile — only to watch his adopted country collapse into autocracy a few years later. In 1973, a violent coup installed a military dictatorship, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, wiping out Chilean democracy in one brutal stroke. “Nobody expected that it would be as bloody as it was,” Przeworski told me. “Or that it would last for 17 years.”
That shocking turn of events, in a country Przeworski thought he knew well, motivated him to find an answer to a seemingly simple question: Why do some democracies survive while others fall into autocracy? “That really was kind of an event that set my intellectual agenda for 50 years,” Przeworski, now an emeritus professor of politics at New York University, said recently.
More here.
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